The latest paperbacks, including Peter Gay's Modernism, Benjamin Black's The
Lemur, a biography of Led Zeppelin and a science fiction blockbuster

It is ironic that the word “terse” recurs so often in this 600-page history. Terseness and a rejection of ornamentation are, for Peter Gay, what link the Twenties’ ballets of Balanchine with the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. (“Less is more” was the latter’s coinage.) Humour has little place in this book — perhaps unsurprisingly since modernists took both their art and themselves seriously. Yet this is still a commendably lively if uneven survey. Gay acknowledges the difficulties of defining modernism — the book encompasses both Proust and Duchamp, two very different figures — but settles on two key features. The modernist is a heretic who pushes boundaries and is committed to “principled self-scrutiny”. This definition does not always serve: T S Eliot’s assertion that poetry should be “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” is dealt with briskly.

On the whole, though, Gay is wary of letting generalisations overwhelm his examples, which are illuminatingly handled. Observing, with regard to Baudelaire, that modernism thrived in cities, Gay also notes Monet’s need to flee from Paris to the provinces: “What I do here will at least have the merit of not resembling anybody, because it is simply the expression of what I’ve experienced myself.” Monet, Gay reminds us, once represented the shock of the new.

Stephanie Cross

The Hugo Young Papers

by Hugo Young

Penguin, £14.99

On The Sunday Times and then The Guardian until his early death in 2003, Hugo Young was the outstanding political commentator of his generation. He was by turns Olympian and withering (see Tony Blair and Iraq). He had a reporter’s curiosity but wrote with the authority of a High Court judge. From 1969 to 2003 he typed a detailed account of his lunches with the political class. His notes reveal the private thoughts of leading politicians including all the prime ministers (bar James Callaghan) of the past four decades — and the verdict on them from their rivals and contemporaries. They are revealing and utterly fascinating.

Brian MacArthur

Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

Atlantic, £9.99

It would be easy to be daunted by Anathem, a 900-page piece of science fiction packed with made-up words and discussions of maths and philosophy. Neal Stephenson’s previous works have shown that he understands the strange cast of mind of the scientist as well as any writer alive — so his parallel world, in which the intellectuals live apart from humanity, like cloistered religious orders, is coherent, detailed and wonderfully convincing. Yet he does not rest on his laurels: having created this world, he smashes it apart in a marvellous fusion of Hollywood blockbuster, historical fable and PhD thesis. Highbrow, high-octane and highly recommended.

Robert Colvile

When Giants Walked the Earth

by Mick Wall

Orion, £8.99

Mick Wall’s excellent biography leaves us in little doubt that Led Zeppelin was Jimmy Page’s creation. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do,” the guitarist told Wall, though he could not have foreseen how popular Zeppelin would become, nor could he have predicted the substance abuse that dulled the band’s creative spark and caused the death of the drummer John Bonham. The book draws on Wall’s extensive interviews with the band but its unofficial nature gives him leeway to address critically Page’s obsession with the self-styled magician Aleister Crowley and to describe Page’s “farcical” appearance at the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony. Ian Critchley

The Day We Won the War

by Charles Messenger

Phoenix, £8.99

The action at Amiens on August 8 1918 marked the first time that the Allies, principally the Australians and the Canadians, managed to get things right. Instead of the three-day barrages that had presaged earlier attacks, intelligence gathered by air allowed accurate artillery fire on key German defensive points while a creeping barrage protected the tanks and infantry as they advanced across no man’s land. It was the beginning of the end for the German army and Charles Messenger’s entertaining book is particularly good on the lessons learnt and the conclusions drawn (which the Germans would put into practice 20 years later). TC

The Lemur

by Benjamin Black

Picador, £7.99

When ex-CIA operative and industrialist billionaire “Big Bill” Mulholland hires his son-in-law to write his memoirs, a long buried secret is unearthed that threatens their family’s privileged way of life. The son-in-law, a washed up campaigning journalist, hires a man who looks like a lemur as a researcher, only for him to end up with a bullet in his eye. Was the murder connected to something he had discovered about Big Bill? To be honest, it hardly matters since The Lemur is a mood piece that finds John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black) on experimental form, and it is, in its quiet way, not only impressive and enjoyable, but beautifully autumnal.

Toby Clements

An Equal Stillness

by Francesca Kay

Phoenix, £7.99

Jennet Mallow is pregnant and she must give up her place at art school if she wants to keep the baby (it’s 1947). The father is David Heaton, another student, regarded as a painter destined for greatness. The two marry and move to Spain, living off his sales to galleries back in London. More children arrive (twins), yet Jennet never forgets her own artistic talent. As her reputation grows, David sinks into the arms of an ex-girlfriend: a deceit that emboldens Jennet in her own adultery. The supple, verbless sentences of Francesca Kay’s accomplished first novel (which won this year’s Orange Prize for new writers) create a sensuous prose full of colour, taste and smell.